Today's Random Thought

How come, in any office, anywhere, people manage to get through enough paper to render a tropical rainforest obsolete in about an hour? Companies are obsessed with paper. It’s as if their whole reputation is being judged solely on the amount of paper it generates. People in offices will pretty much utilize paper for everything from scribbling random phone numbers to photocopying their buttocks. In the age of technology is it really necessary to have hard copies of everything? Seriously, I’m drowning in a sea of paper, most of it unnecessary or useless and I can’t find the things I do need.

You require paper for some things. It’s fairly hard, for example, to wipe your ass with a CD, although feel perfectly free to correct me if I’m wrong, you’ve tried this method and it works for you.

And I concede, you need to print documents for meetings sometimes or the world will stop spinning and topple off its axis.

Also, if you’re me, you need to write in a notebook because you forget things five seconds after hearing them. This is all fine and considered legitimate by me.

However…

My boss is fairly old school about some things. He likes files of the paper variety and everything we do is kept in these files. Mainly tons of paper no one will ever need or look at ever again. Me? I like to keep electronic copies and if I didn’t generate the document myself, then I’ll scan it and keep it on my hard drive. It’s easy to find, fast and it’s paper free. I don’t need space to keep it and I don’t have to spend 30 minutes digging through mountains of archive files, getting paper cuts on my extremities, in order to track it down later. Paper files are, by and large, unnecessary in the numbers they are generated. He’s also a little techno-incompetent and will mis-print a 110 page document, not realize he can stop the print job and let it run its course, producing 110 pages of alien hieroglyphics.

We have a Xerox room on my floor. The room has a wall that is stacked floor to ceiling high with reams of paper. In the course of maybe two days this stack will deplete to about a quarter of its original stock. There are maybe 55 people on the floor tops. Which begs the question, what are people doing with all that paper? Are they having paper airplane swap meets? Are they running origami classes no one told me about? Maybe they are experimenting with papier macher? Who knows? I just know it disappears faster than Paris Hilton at a spelling bee.

I just think that more could be done to conserve resources like paper in the mass quantities we consume it in offices. Maybe more recycling?

I’m now going to go hug a tree.